Today we think of race as being determined solely by the color of a person’s skin. However, in the early 19th century when the Irish were immigrating to America by the thousands, races were divided by not only skin color, but also by things like nationality and religion. The Irish were categorized as Celts, and were deemed aesthetically and personally inferior to Anglo-Saxons.
A lot of the anti-Catholic views upheld in America could be credited to the anti-Catholic legislation in British colonies. After seeing Ireland for themselves, Gustave de Beaumont equated Celts with negroes for being the lowest life forms, and Thomas Carlyle equated Celts with animals, and assumed that they were inherently lazy and stupid.
In the mid 1830s, “Samuel F.B. Morse, the father of the American Telegraph” (Painter, 135) and Yale alumnus and prime minister Lyman Beecher were two popular figures in America whose anti-Celt views helped influence others to feel the same. Morse wrote texts about why Celts were lesser than Anglo-Saxons, and Beecher preached strongly anti-Catholic sermons, which led a mob to burn down the Ursuline convent school in Charlestown.
In 1836, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed became very popular and well know, and sold “some 300,000 copies by 1860” (Painter, 136). The book told Maria Monk’s story of what it was like to be a nun in the Catholic church, and how nuns’ obedience to the priests often involved rape of the nuns and murdering offspring. Even after investigation of the validity of the story “quickly disproved Monk’s allegations” (Painter, 137), it led many publications to be written about how bad and immorally sexual Catholicism was. This of course caused more people to have anti-Catholic views.
A variety of crises occurring in Western Europe in the mid-1840s, including political unrest and agricultural failure, led many mainland Europeans to immigrate to America. This great increase in America’s immigrant population led to the creation of the first U.S. census in 1850, which showed that nearly half of the immigrants were from Ireland. Despite the diversity of the German immigrant population “in terms of wealth, politics, and religion” (Painter, 138), they were better received than the Irish due to their tendency to become wealthy. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading intellectual in America, furthered this clear distaste of the Irish in his writing by reinforcing the Paddy stereotype.
Cartoons also “played an important role in reinforcing the Paddy stereotype” (Painter, 141). Thomas Nast, editorial cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly pictured a balance beam with a negro on one side and a Celt on the other to represent their equal inferiority to Anglo-Saxons. Even those who were on the pro-abolition side of slavery could draw parallels between the Negro and Celt. After a “visit to Ireland in the famine year of 1845” (Painter, 143), Frederick Douglass did just that. However, Irish people in the United Stated were totally against this assumption, for they understood that although they were Irish, it was better to be white in America than to be black. This anti-black ideology led many Irish to vote in favor of the pro-slavery Democratic Party.
During the mid 19th century when Irish nationalism flourished, two non-Irish writers named Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold “laid a basis for the study of Celtic literature” (Painter, 144). Despite their rather condescending and patronizing words, they shed light on the idea that though the Celts may have been a pathetic race, it was not the fault of an inherently inferior mind, but rather that of unfortunate circumstances and situations in their country. Nevertheless, the Celts took a liking to these writers at the time.
The Order of United Americans was an extremely violent anti-Catholic terror group that first appeared in New York, and by the mid-1850s had “flourished in sixteen states” (Painter,147), including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Then, the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, a nativist American and anti-Catholic group, was founded in New York. These groups and others like them were known as “Know-Nothings” because they “responded to queries about their orders with “I know nothing”” (Painter, 147). Mobs were incited by these groups upon a visiting papal envoy in 1853, and “a mob in Ellsworth, Maine tarred and feathered a Catholic priest before nearly burning him to death” (Painter, 148) in 1854.
The influx of anti-Catholic views led many of the members of these Know-Nothing groups to be elected into office during the fall elections of 1854. When in office, they passed bills that prohibited “people not born in the United States from holding political office and … extend[ed] the naturalization period to twenty-one years” (Painter, 149), which in turn made it more difficult for immigrants to vote and be involved in politics.
Know-Nothings did well in elections and were a powerful group until “1855 [when] the question of slavery in the Nebraska Territory” (Painter, 150) separated the pro-slavery south from the pro-abolition north. Most Know-Nothings from the north joined the newly-founded Republican Party, and those from the south rejoined the Democratic Party. While the worst of the violence against poor Irish-Catholics was over, they were still viewed as Celts. They as well as Africans remained inferior to Anglo-Saxons, who “monopolized the identity of the American” (Painter,150).
